George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Tuesday evening, in the course of debate on the ASIO Legislation Amendment Bill 2006, Senator Faulkner made a particularly savage and nasty attack upon the former Member for Tangney, the Hon. Daryl Williams QC. Mr Williams was the Attorney-General at the time when significant amendments to the ASIO Act were passed in 2002 to deal with the greater threat of domestic terrorism which was perceived to exist as a result of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Those amendments, as Senator Faulkner rightly said, were controversial at the time. They were controversial both across party lines and within the government parties themselves.

As a new backbencher, I took an active role in that controversy within the Attorney-General’s backbench committee, so I can speak with personal knowledge of Mr Williams’s handling of the matter. In the end, the government parties agreed on a final draft bill, which was eventually passed by the Senate with the support of the Australian Labor Party, then led by Senator Faulkner. In debating the bill which was before the chamber last week, and which introduced further provisions relating to the questioning and detention powers of ASIO, Senator Faulkner chose to make a venomous attack upon Mr Williams, and in particular upon his role in the earlier legislation.

I want to make four points about Senator Faulkner’s attack. The first thing to say is that it was entirely gratuitous. It was completely unnecessary for the purpose of debating the bill which was before the chamber last week. I can only wonder what possessed Senator Faulkner to make such a savage attack upon the former Attorney-General for no apparent reason.

The second point I want to make is that Mr Williams has, of course, been retired from parliament for almost two years. He is a private citizen, and although as a former Attorney-General he is still, in a sense, a public figure, I would have thought that ordinary fairness and common decency demand that a retired member of parliament should not be the subject of such vicious sledging, under the cover of parliamentary privilege, as Senator Faulkner engaged in at his expense last week. In fact, it is only because Mr Williams is a private citizen that Senator Faulkner was able to get away with it: had Mr Williams still been a member of parliament, Senator Faulkner’s tirade would have been plainly in breach of standing order 193(3). So Senator Faulkner used, about a private citizen, words which he would not have been permitted to use against another parliamentarian. Yet I think all of us would agree that, by the ethics of this place, other politicians are fair game but private citizens who are no longer engaged in politics ordinarily are not.

Senator Faulkner had plenty of opportunities to attack Mr Williams when he was still in parliament, and he did not miss them. Indeed, if one searches the Hansard record, it seems as if Senator Faulkner has an almost morbid obsession with Mr Daryl Williams. He attacked him in this chamber on 10 March 1998. He attacked him again, in connection with the antiterrorism legislation, on 25 June 2002—and not merely on the merits of the legislation but in the most insulting personal terms which I will not repeat. He attacked him once again in offensive personal terms on 12 December 2002, again on 12 June 2003, and again on 4 March 2004, when he made a remark that he was required to withdraw by the Acting Deputy President, Senator McLucas.

Each of these attacks, although in the context of debate on legislation, was characterised by gratuitous, personally offensive and undignified remarks. So it is not as if Senator Faulkner has not had plenty of opportunities to vent his opinions about Mr Williams. He did so repeatedly, almost obsessively, when Mr Williams was in parliament and was fair game. But Mr Williams is not in parliament now, and he has not been an active participant in politics since he retired from parliament. He is not the holder of any public appointments which might otherwise bring him within the proper scope of parliamentary criticism, as has been the case with other retired ministers from both sides of politics. He has been an uncontroversial private citizen, practising his profession after having devoted almost 12 years, of what would otherwise have been the most productive and lucrative years of his professional career, to the service of the Australian people.

That brings me to the third of the observations I want to make about Mr Daryl Williams, and why Senator Faulkner’s spiteful personal attack on him was just so unfair. I think most people in this place would recognise instinctively that there are some political figures who will always be fair game, even after they have left parliament. In particular, this will be the case with those who, when they were in parliament, were tough, bruising, perhaps divisive politicians who sought no quarter and gave none. I do not intend to mention any particular individual, but we can all think of examples. Perhaps Senator Faulkner himself is such a person—indeed, I daresay he would be flattered to be thought so.

But almost the very last person you can imagine as someone who would for that reason be fair game for attack after their political days were over is Mr Daryl Williams QC. Indeed, the one criticism which was sometimes heard of Mr Williams when he was in parliament—a good-natured criticism, to be sure—was that his political days never began. Sometimes, government members despaired of Mr Daryl Williams that he was just not political enough, that he was a barrister who became a member of parliament but never became a politician. In fact, I do not think Mr Williams would be particularly displeased to be remembered in that way. He embraced a view of the role of the Attorney-General which now seems almost quaint: as a person who, in virtue of his position as the first law officer of the Crown, stands a little apart from partisan politics, a little aloof from the everyday cut and thrust.

As everyone who knew him in this place would unhesitatingly aver, Mr Williams was quietly spoken, unfailingly polite, extremely careful and never given to extravagance, either of language or of conduct—hence his ironical nickname within government circles of ‘Rowdy’. Those of us who knew him in parliament knew him to be the perfect gentleman. How such a quiet, cerebral, gentle soul could provoke the immoderate, vulgar, offensive, churlish, angry language in which Senator Faulkner indulged last Tuesday utterly mystifies me.

Let me make one last point. In his speech last week, Senator Faulkner made an attack upon Mr Williams’s professional competence, in particular in his handling of the ASIO legislation. Allow me to say as one who dealt with Mr Williams at the time, not merely about the policy of the legislation but in detail about the drafting of many clauses of the bill, that that criticism is absolute rubbish. Mr Williams engaged in lengthy dialogue about the minutiae, with all of the command of detail and technical skill which one would have expected of a lawyer of his seniority and which would have been matched by few, if any, other ministers.

When Mr Williams came to this parliament in 1993 he had already risen to the top of his profession, having been appointed a Queen’s Counsel some 11 years earlier at the relatively young age of 39. He had had and has since resumed a successful career at the bar. The esteem in which his peers held him was such that he was elected as the national president of his professional association, the Law Council of Australia, in 1986 and was subsequently made a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the community. When he was the Attorney-General he revived the practice which had fallen into desuetude of leading for the Commonwealth in important constitutional cases in the High Court. In short, Mr Williams’s career was one of uninterrupted distinction which anyone here might rightly envy and which very few could hope to rival.

I might add that Senator Faulkner also did not scruple to make the most patronising, offensive and sexist remarks about Mr Williams’s staff, who are not fair game either and who, to my own knowledge of many of them, were exceptionally talented young lawyers—in most cases recruited from the top-tier law firms in Melbourne and Sydney—and had, like Mr Williams, chosen to deviate from lucrative professional careers to spend a period of years in public service.

As many honourable senators know, I actually like Senator Faulkner. In particular, I respect and share his deep sense of history. I have enjoyed our many exchanges in this chamber and in Senate committees and have never felt bruised by them. I know Senator Faulkner to be a champion of this place, its standards, traditions and processes. But I cannot help saying that Senator Faulkner has seriously let himself down and let the best standards of the Senate down by this very indecent attack upon a gentleman who, it must be said, has made a much greater contribution to Australia than he has done and whose public conduct has never given cause for offence.